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November 15 Dead LanguagesLatin can be dense and boring with sentences that go on forever with complications of grammar including declensions, case, and conjugations (read Caesar or Cicero.)
Latin can also be spooky and luscious (the Catholic Latin Mass, Carmina Burana, gregorian chant, and this song by Enya.)
Click on the link below for an example (if you load into Window Media Player and get the printed lyrics, please excuse the spelling errors. The lyrics were downloaded from the net:)
Song in Latin by Enya. November 08 Short History of War1. On 9/11/2001, 19 men hijacked airplanes and caused the death of some 2,976 people and some $650 Billion in damages. 15 of the hijackers were Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese and two were from the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
2. In the hours following that attack air travel in the US was shut down except for a few flights authorized by the Bush White House that returned dozens of Saudi citizens, many of them Bin Laden family members, to their home country.
3. The US attacked Afghanistan, supposedly to capture/kill Bin Laden and to neutralize the taliban/Al Qaeda. In one of the most strategically moronic military moves in the history of warfare, the US chased Bin Laden from where he was into the uncontested Afghan/Pakistan border regions where he escaped. Since that time we have supported a puppet urban Afghan government fighting a civil war against medieval rural warlords while the country continues to live in armed conflict and continues to grow record Opium crops as its major source of income.
4. The US also attacked Iraq under false pretenses having nothing whatever to do with 9/11.
5. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone on longer than WWII.
6. Foreign terrorists caused the deaths of some 3, 000 Americans on 9/11. Two American Presidents, on the other hand, are responsible for the deaths of some 4,000 US soldiers since then in Iraq and Afghanistan, besides the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan military and civilian deaths due to our intervention.
7. Guantanamo is still open, rendition is still taking place, torture is still ok, and the Patriot Act is still in effect. We have lost our moral high-ground and a measure of our civil liberties as well as violated the law of land warfare, the Geneva Conventions, and international law. Not one of our elected officials has been impeached or held accountable for their crimes or censured for their stupidity.
8. Another 5 years in Iraq or 40,000 more troops in Afghanistan isn't going to result in any beneficial outcome to us or them.
9. As the C&W singer said, "Ya gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em."
Cost of U.S. Wars Since 2001
$926,906,942,391
Cost of War in Afghanistan
$230,543,563,508 |
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